Christmas ornaments a treasure trove of family memories

Tree ornaments tell stories of a family's history over the years.

Photograph by: Sean Gallup
, Getty Images Europe

Every Christmas in our household has begun the same way for the last 46 years, since we first set up house overlooking a sullen, stormtossed December sea.

Surf boomed up the beach as it has since long before the first Christmas and sent spindrift spattering against the drafty, single-glazed windows.

From a tattered cardboard banker's box, I'd retrieve the few ornaments that a couple of impecunious university students could afford.

Then we'd set about decorating the tree.

It was never one of the bushy, shapely, perfectly proportioned specimens on offer from the Scouts, the Air Cadets or the commercial tree farms.

Who could afford to pay for a tree by the foot when almost every dime went for rent and there were still presents to buy, a Christmas dinner chicken to acquire - A turkey? You must be kidding! - and hopefully enough left over for a cheap bottle of wine.

So our tree was one of the scrawny, spindly specimens that could be found reaching for the light by hiking half an hour up some power line rightof-way.

What came out of the banker's box was in keeping with the tree.

The ornaments were few and, shall we say, austere.

There were a few pieces supplied by parents, still a bit doubtful about the wisdom and practicality of all this.

But love is blind to austerity, at least it is when it's the real deal.

If the tree needed decorating and we were skint for ornaments, then we'd decorate with our imaginations.

The first of these was a brass troller bell, acquired from one of the West Coast doubleenders that tied up at the dock in Campbell River. These bells are rigged so that their jingling tells when there's a fish on the line.

It joined a star made from bent coat-hanger wire and wrapped in silver Mylar foil inherited from a demon bucktailer.

Over the years, our inventory of homemade, homespun and appropriated tree ornaments has expanded.

There is the little red pepper picked up on a trip to New Mexico and a little green kachina, Patung, one of the Hopi spirits from Second Mesa who is the steward of squash and gourds.

There's the angel made from tinsel and foil in a preschool class long forgotten by the university student who is now older than we were when the first tree was decorated.

Among the other notables: a peculiar yellow plastic banana that's also a harmonica, a little striped trumpet, a white plastic elk, a papier mâche bluebird, a knitted green frog that was intended as a change purse but now stands in for his peeping tree frog cousins in the rain-forest, a pair of tiny, perfect snowshoes from Whitehorse, a winter owl made from Pang-nirtung sealskin, a bemused sheep made of wool from a Sat-urna farm, some gilded flowers from a Buddhist friend, a handblown glass ball that was once the sole decoration on a war-time tree in Toronto, provided to a pair of homesick Vancouverites by a wise and kind Jewish landlady, beach shells from the Outer Gulf Islands, found and assembled by a beloved little daughter, a red-nosed rein-deer made from a Christmas light bulb with antlers fashioned from pipe-cleaner.

If these decorations seem idiosyncratic, they are. Each one resonates with a set of family memories, which surely is what Christmas rituals are meant to evoke.

Picking favourites is a tricky business, as are the overlap-ping, concentric rings of family memory itself, one generation's eventually giving way to that of the next's.

But if I were to pick one, I think it would be that little brass troller bell from our first tree, threadbare as it seemed, yet rich in cherished memories as it came to be, a metaphor for life itself.